The term négritude was meant to be provocative. It takes its roots from the Latin niger, which was used exclusively in a racist context within France. It would be used to refer to black people as art nègre. Negritude sought to appropriate the word. The term was first used in its present sense by Césaire, in the third issue of L'Étudiant noir, a magazine which he had started in Paris with fellow students Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as Gilbert Gratiant, Leonard Sainville, Louis T. Achille, Aristide Maugée, and Paulette Nardal. L'Étudiant noir also includes Césaire's first published work, Conscience Raciale et Révolution Sociale with the heading "Les Idées" and the rubric "Négreries", which is notable for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resistance and for its use of the word nègre as a positive term. The problem with assimilation was that one assimilated into a culture that considered African culture to be barbaric and unworthy of being seen as "civilized". The assimilation into this culture would have been seen as an implicit acceptance of this view. Nègre previously had been used mainly in a pejorative sense. Césaire deliberately incorporated this derogatory word into the name of his philosophy.

During the 1920s and 1930s, a group of young black students and scholars, primarily from France's colonies and territories, assembled in Paris. There they were introduced to some writers of the Harlem Renaissance by Paulette Nardal and her sister Jane. The Nardal sisters contributed to the Negritude discussions by their writings and by being the proprietors of the Clamart Salon, a tea-shop venue of the French-Black intelligentsia where Negritude philosophy was often discussed. Paulette Nardal and the Haitian Dr. Leo Sajou initiated La revue du Monde Noir (1931–32), a literary journal published in English and French, which attempted to appeal to African and Caribbean intellectuals in Paris. This Harlem association was shared by the parallel development of negrismo in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean region.

Although each of the initiators had his own ideas about the purpose and styles of la Négritude, the philosophy was characterized generally by opposing colonialism, the denunciation of Europe's alleged lack of humanity, and the rejection of Western domination and ideas. The movement also appears to have had some Heideggerian strands in the sense that the goal of this movement was to achieve blacks' "being-in-the-world". This was to emphasize that blacks did have a history and a worthy culture, and that it was capable of standing alongside the cultures of other countries as equals. Also important was the acceptance of and pride in being black and a celebration of African history, traditions, and beliefs. Their literary style was realistic and they cherished Marxist ideas.

Motivation for the Negritude movement was a result of Aime Cesaire’s, Leopold Senghor’s, and Leon Damas’s dissatisfaction, disgust, and personal conflict over the state of black French experience in France. All three shared a personal sense of revolt for the racism and colonial injustices that plagued their world and their French education. Senghor refused to believe that the purpose of his education was "to build Christianity and civilization in his soul where there was only paganism and barbarism before". Cesaire's disgust came as embarrassment when he was accused by some of the people of the caribbean as having nothing to do with the people of Africa—whom they saw as savages. They separated themselves from Africa and proclaimed themselves as civilized. He denounced the writers from the Caribbean as "intellectually... corrupt and literarily nourished with white decadence".[3] Damas believed this because of the pride these writers would take when a white person could read their whole book and not be able to tell the author's complexion.

Aimé Césaire was a poet, playwright, and politician from Martinique. He studied in Paris, where he discovered the black community and "rediscovered Africa". He saw la Négritude as the fact of being black, acceptance of this fact, and appreciation of the history and culture, and of black people. It is important to note that for Césaire, this emphasis on the acceptance of the fact of "blackness" was the means by which the "decolonization of the mind" could be achieved. According to him, western imperialism was responsible for the inferiority complex of blacks. He sought to recognize the collective colonial experience of Blacks—the slave trade and plantation system. Césaire's ideology was especially important during the early years of la Négritude.

Neither Césaire—who after returning to Martinique after his studies was elected mayor of Fort de France, the capital, and a representative of Martinique in France's Parliament—nor Senghor in Senegal envisaged political independence from France. Négritude would, according to Senghor, enable Blacks in French lands to have a "seat at the give and take [French] table as equals". However the French eventually presented Senegal and its other African colonies with independence.

Poet and the later first president of Sénégal, Senghor used la Négritude to work toward a universal valuation of African people. He advocated a modern incorporation of the expression and celebration of traditional African customs and ideas. This interpretation of la Négritude tended to be the most common, particularly during later years.

Damas was a French Guyanese poet and National Assembly member. He had a militant style of defending "black qualities" and rejected any kind of reconciliation with caucasians. Two particular anthologies were pivotal to the movement, which would serve as manifestos for the movement. One was published by Damas in 1946, Poètes d'expression française 1900–1945. Senghor would then go on to publish Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française in 1948. Damas’s introduction to the anthology and the anthology was meant to be a sort of manifesto for the movement, but Senghor's own anthology eventually took that role. Though it would be the “Preface” written by French philosopher and public intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre for the anthology which would propel Negritude into the broader intellectual conversation.

As a manifesto for the Negritude movement Damas’ introduction was more political and cultural in nature. A distinctive feature of Damas’s anthology and beliefs was that Damas felt that his message was one for the colonized in general, and included poets from Indochina and Madagascar. This is sharply in contrast to Senghor’s anthology which would be published two years later. In the introduction Damas proclaimed that now was the age where "the colonized man becomes aware of his rights and of his duties as a writer, as a novelist or a storyteller, an essayist or a poet." Damas explicitly outlines the themes of the anthology. He says, "Poverty, illiteracy, exploitation of man by man, social and political racism suffered by the black or the yellow, forced labor, inequalities, lies, resignation, swindles, prejudices, complacencies, cowardice, failure, crimes committed in the name of liberty, of equality, of fraternity, that is the theme of this indigenous poetry in French." Damas’ introduction was indeed a calling and affirmation for a distinct cultural identification.

In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre analyzed the négritude philosophy in an essay called "Orphée Noir" ("Black Orpheus")[4] that served as the introduction to a volume of francophone poetry named Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, compiled by Léopold Senghor. In this essay, Sartre characterizes négritude as the opposite of colonial racism in a Hegeliandialectic and with it he helped to introduce Négritude issues to French intellectuals. In his opinion, négritude was an "anti-racist racism" (racisme antiraciste), a strategy with a final goal of racial unity.

Négritude was criticized by some black writers during the 1960s as insufficiently militant. Keorapetse Kgositsile said that the term Négritude was based too much on blackness according to a caucasian aesthetic, and was unable to define a new kind of perception of African-ness that would free black people and black art from caucasian conceptualizations altogether.

The Nigerian dramatist, poet, and novelist Wole Soyinka opposed Négritude. He believed that by deliberately and outspokenly being proud of their ethnicity, black people were automatically on the defensive: "Un tigre ne proclame pas sa tigritude, il saute sur sa proie" (French: A tiger doesn't proclaim its tigerness; it jumps on its prey).

After a long period of silence there has been a renaissance of Negritude developed by scholars such as Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia), Donna Jones (Berkeley),[5] and Cheikh Thiam (Ohio State) who all continue the work of Abiola Irele. Cheikh Thiam's book is the only book-length study of Negritude as philosophy. It develops Diagne's reading of Negritude as a philosophy of art, and Jones' presentation of Negritude as a lebensphilosophie.

American physician Benjamin Rush, a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence and early abolitionist, used the term negritude to imagine a rhetorical "disease" which he said was a mild form of leprosy, the only cure of which was to become white. This early use of the term may not have been known by the Francophone blacks who developed the philosophy of Negritude during the 20th century.[6]